But when they couldn't find anyone else to replace him on the witness stand, Attorney General Bill McCollum overruled his trial attorneys, quickly hired Rekers, and paid him twice his agreed upon contract with no questions asked, according to documents released this week by McCollum's office.

Rekers, a psychiatry professor at the University of South Carolina, has been stripped of his credibility after reports surfaced that he hired a male escort from rentboy.com to give him nude "sexual" massages and accompany him on a recent European vacation.

The adoption ban has been ruled unconstitutional and the state is appealing. The state paid Rekers more than $120,000 to testify on the "negative effects" of gay parenting.

Rekers' fee was almost a third of what the state has spent on the gay adoption ban lawsuit to date — $383,000. Half the cost has gone to attorneys fees; the rest to general expenses, including $120,000 to Rekers.

Meanwhile, records obtained by St. Petersburg Times and the Miami Herald show that despite repeated objections from the Department of Children and Families, the attorney general agreed to advance Rekers $60,900 to get him to take the case and another $59,700 a year later as the case dragged on.

The payments included $9,000 for 30 hours of searching journal articles and books, $27,000 to "read the relevant publications since Sept. 2004 and evaluate and critique the methodological quality." A year later, he charged for nearly 30 hours for reading the same materials again.

Rekers was paid to meet with the attorney general's staff to prepare for depositions and to be deposed by lawyers for the adoptive parents.

McCollum said he wouldn't hire Rekers again knowing what he knows today, but he defends the expense.

"If you look at the record, you will see he actually earned it," McCollum said this week. "He definitely put the hours and the time in. This is not a case where we overpaid him."

DCF asked the attorney general's office to handle the case in February 2007 because then-Secretary Bob Butterworth was focused on turning around the agency beset by troubles.

"We basically had to," Butterworth said last week, noting that failing to defend the ban against a lawsuit challenging it would been like picking a fight with the GOP-controlled Legislature.

"The only problem we had was the expert, and the amount of money and the credibility of the expert," he said.

Documents show that instead of raising questions about the bill submitted by Rekers, McCollum's staff asked for the first check to be expedited because they feared losing him before their deadline to submit the expert witness list.

Deputy Attorney General Bob Hannah said Rekers asked for the money up front so that his fees would not be contested, as had happened in previous cases in which he testified.

But the attorney general had to find a creative way to get the money to him. "Our finance folks said the only way to do that is through a purchase order," Hannah said.

Rekers had been used in a previous case involving the state DCF and was retained as an expert witness in an Arkansas case. But the lead trial attorney defending the state ban on gay adoption, Assistant Attorney General Valerie Martin strongly urged the state not to use him again.

"Dr. Rekers is a right-wing, religious based expert who I was reluctant to use, but nevertheless contacted him with no response," Martin wrote in a March 2007 e-mail to John Slye, DCF deputy general counsel.

The trial date was extended to August and the state then considered 35 possible expert witnesses but, Martin said in a July e-mail, she was ordered to hire Rekers "against my strong cautions."

McCollum said he was aware that Rekers was not considered as credible in Arkansas as he had been in a previous case in which he was used in Florida, "but he was qualified. There was never any dispute over his qualifications."

Hannah acknowledged they hired Rekers to bolster their case. "If you haven't hired the experts to help you win the case, then you're not doing the job. You can't sit and rationalize over the expert or later even over his personal life," she said.